I’ve just returned from a trip to the Philippines. Most of my time was spent in Manila but I also spent a day in a small town about two hours outside of Manila, meeting the family of my current girlfriend. As you probably know, Filipinos are some of the warmest and most generous people in Asia. Year after year, they always come out on top in polls that try to gauge which country’s people are the happiest. All of that may hold true for my girlfriend’s family. They welcomed me into their home with open arms and a table weighed down with platters of local food. Oh, I almost forgot, they also tortured me for six hours.

No, I wasn’t tied up, beaten or waterboarded. Any of those would have been an improvement. They had rented this huge rolling karaoke machine for the day and they kept it going the entire time I was there. “Do you like karaoke?” they asked me almost as soon as I arrived. “Um, well, sort of,” I mumbled, in an effort to be polite. “But,” I continued, “I’m not a good singer. When I sing, all the children will start crying.” That didn’t work. So I said, “I don’t like slow pop songs; I only like to sing fast rock ’n’ roll songs.” One of the uncles smiled, nodded his head and asked, encouragingly, “Do you like Barry Manilow? He’s wonderful. That’s great rock ’n’ roll!” I turned to my girlfriend and whispered softly in her ear, “Kill me
now. Please.” But, no, they were not going to put me out of my misery so quickly.

Eventually, after slugging back a few Red Horse ‘extra strength’ beers, I was ready to step up to the microphone. I flipped through the songbook desperately hoping to find some rock amongst a sea of pop and found Pride (In the Name of Love) and Dancing in the Dark. (I would have preferred Thunder Road but that wasn’t going to happen.)

I’ve had to do a lot of karaoke over the years – usually I’m forced into it because it’s business related. And one thing I’ve noticed is that throughout Asia, everyone else just sits there when they sing, staring at the monitor and concentrating intensely on their performance. But when it’s my turn, I try to live out all my rock ’n’ roll fantasies. So I twirled the microphone like Roger Daltrey. I shook my hips like Elvis. And I sang … well, I sang like a duck that’s just been run over by an 18-wheeler. Nevertheless, the women whistled and the men cheered but I don’t think they’ll be naming any babies after me.

The day wore on and the karaoke kept going. About the best I can say is that I was spared those mainstays of the Filipino bands in Wanchai, songs like Sweet Home Alabama, Come On Eileen or Tub Thumping. But when Rihanna’s Umbrella came around for the third time, I started desperately searching for anything at all that might plug up my ears – blankets, rice, small children – but nothing was blocking out the sound of people tunelessly singing along to bad versions of bad Tom Jones songs while meaningless videos played on the screen. By the way, the reason people in those karaoke videos always look so happy - they don’t have to listen to you.

Finally, politeness be damned, I retired to the back room, stretched out on the bed, dug my iPod out of my bag and put on some actual music. At this point, logic might have dictated that I go for some classic rock to get my equilibrium back, some Who’s Next, Exile on Main Street, Layla, that kind of thing. Or I could have opted for Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the splendid new album from David Byrne and Brian Eno (currently available only as a digital download).
But as it happens, there’s been one album that I haven’t been able to stop playing all week, and that day was no exception – Grapefruit Moon: The Songs of Tom Waits by Southside Johnny and the LaBamba Big Band.

I don’t expect that most of my readers will know John Lyon, aka Southside Johnny. Back in the ’70s, he was a key figure in the New Jersey music scene. A close friend of Bruce Springsteen, he recorded three terrific albums with his band The Asbury Jukes, produced by Springsteen lead guitarist (and latter day Sopranos co-star) Steve Van Zandt. This was horn-driven, rocked-up white soul music, covers of classic tunes mixed with new songs from both Springsteen and Van Zandt. Springsteen wrote what became his signature tune, The Fever. But the albums didn’t sell well, Lyon and Springsteen fell out and the Jukes were dropped by their record label. Southside Johnny has continued to tour and make records for the past 30 years but there hasn’t been anything to attract the interest of anyone but diehard fans.

And then I heard about Grapefruit Moon and thought to myself, “Wtf? Southside Johnny singing Tom Waits songs? Big band versions of Tom Waits songs? This is something I’ve got to hear.” I bought the album on iTunes and absolutely love it.

There have certainly been plenty of cover versions of Tom Waits songs over the years; seemingly everyone from the Eagles to Rod Stewart has borrowed from the Waits catalogue. Holly Cole did an entire album of Waits songs a decade or so ago that’s well worth hearing and Scarlett Johansson, of all people, did an all Tom Waits album earlier this year that’s best forgotten.

I won’t forget Grapefruit Moon though. Southside’s voice isn’t entirely what it used to be – he was never a technically great singer but now his voice is so rough that at times it almost sounds like he’s trying to imitate Waits. As a matter of fact, when Waits himself turns up for a duet, you might have trouble telling the two of them apart. Even so, Johnny sounds completely at home here. Start with Down, Down, Down – Johnny blowing his harp, the band just wailing behind him, a great horn arrangement, and Johnny nailing the lyrics. Another highlight is All the Time in the World, which sounds like it should have been the theme song to some ’40’s film noir while Dead and Lovely comes off like a lost Brecht/Weill classic.

Most people tend to cover Waits songs from the earlier, more commercial part of his career, but Grapefruit Moon steers clear of better known songs like Jersey Girl, Ol’ 55 or Tom Traubert’s Blues. There are only three songs from the ’70s; the rest lead from the ’80s up through to the present decade. Given Waits’ penchant for using some of the oddest combinations of instruments and sounds to be found in pop music, you wouldn’t expect to hear these songs in a big-band setting, but they work really well, in no small part due to the 18-piece LaBamba Big Band led by Richie ‘LaBamba’ Rosenberg, an original member of the Jukes and currently one of the Max Weinberg 7 on the Conan O’Brien show. I don’t know who did the arrangements (no digital booklet with this download) but
they’re big, brassy and ballsy charts. Simply put, Southside Johnny is 60 years old, hasn’t recorded much worth a damn in almost 30 years and, out of nowhere, has just released the best album of his career.

Which doesn’t mean that I expect this to sell like lager at a football match. Nor do I think these songs are going to magically appear on the karaoke monster machine the next time I visit my girlfriend’s family. I’m afraid it will be more Neil Sedaka, Petula Clark and Abba. So next time, I’m going to take some noise cancelling headphones along and play this album really loud, eyes closed and lips silently praying for a power failure.